During the Bretton Woods
Conference, in 1944, Lord Halifax is said to have “whispered to Lord Keynes: ‘It’s true: they have
the money bags but we have all the brains.’” By “they,” Halifax meant the
Americans.
His frustration with the
American mind—often prosaic and anti-intellectual—during the critical
Bretton-Woods negotiations seems as valid today. As odious as Britain’s elites
are; boy, are they cleverer than ours. Take the impromptu interview, on June
28, which Richard Quest, CNN’s imported British broadcast journalist, conducted
with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party.
Farage had emerged exhilarated from the coven that is the European
Parliament, where he had shared some home truths with the ponces leeching off Britain.
Other than to mouth formulaically about “small government, big military,
balanced budgets and the penny plan”—America’s chattering class and ruling
elites seem incapable of expressing the principles undergirding freedom. And
members of this political Idiocracy dissolve into a puddle if their cue cards
disappear.
Farage, however, spoke to some
difficult ideas with ease, and without notes.
The act of secession, the quests for sovereignty,
decentralization and regional autonomy from a second tier of tyrants—the first
being the national, British government—involve comprehending complicated ideas.
About this, Milton Friedman forewarned in the
introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” Whereas “the argument for
collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument.” “The
argument for individualism” and freedom, on the other hand, “is subtle and
sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Put differently: If you can’t
express the principles of liberty, can you properly pursue them? Will you not
forgo them?
It’s difficult for dummies
to understand liberty, let alone defend it, a problem the scintillating,
cerebral Mr. Farage doesn’t have.
“You as a political project
are in denial,” he told the grumbling laggards in the EU chamber. The EU had, “by
stealth by deception, and without ever telling the truth to the British and
European people, imposed political union upon them.”
Not to be trusted, EU
advocate Segolene Royal, French environment minister and former socialist
candidate for the French presidency, praised this coerced union, calling it a
“family.” “The family is supposed to have a say in when a member leaves,” she grumbled to BBC’s tough talker, Stephen Sackur.
The sort of family Royal
describes is known as La Familia, a crime family that knee caps you if
you leave.
Heckling Eurocrats were reminded
by Farage that when, in 2005, the people of the Netherlands and France said adieu to an enforced political union—the Eurocrats had
“ignored them and brought in the Lisbon Treaty
through the backdoor.” Indeed, the last refuge of a Brussels scoundrel is the
bureaucracy. When voters scuttled the EU Constitution in that referenda; the
rogues being upbraided by Farage dissolved one illegitimate political structure
and constituted another.
“You’re in denial,” continued
Farage, “about Mrs. Merkel’s invitation to any and all to cross the
Mediterranean and enter the EU, all of which has led to massive divisions
between and within countries.”
What the little people did,
what the ordinary people did, what the people who’ve been oppressed have done
is to reject the multinationals, reject the merchant banks, reject Big
Politics, and demand their country back, their fishing waters back, their
borders back. We want to be an independent self-governing nation. [If
anything], we offer a beacon of hope. The UK will not be the last member state
to leave the EU.
A series of similar
watersheds would follow, predicted Farage.
Fleetingly, at least,
Farage’s fluency with the ideas of freedom took effect. The blank faces
flanking UKIP’s leader looked somewhat animated. Fewer jeered, some even
clapped and cheered as Farage went on to submit that no stalling would be
tolerated. The will of the British people would be heeded forthwith. Called for
was “a grown-up and sensible attitude” toward executing popular—in this case,
naturally licit—wishes.
Mr. Farage was not done,
going on to impress upon EU parliamentarians—none of whom had “held a proper
job” in their lives, “or worked in business or worked in trade, or indeed ever
created a job in [their] lives”—that unlike a coerced political union, trade in
goods was mutually beneficial and voluntary and would continue.
Here the booing resumed.
If, in sensing an opportunity
to exert unauthorized political power, this unelected mob intended to reject
trade between Europe and England, reinstate tariffs and quotas—Mr. Farage was
pleased to inform them that the consequences to Europe would be worse.
No doubt: As statist and
regulated as the once great merchant and maritime nation of Britain has
become—Europe under the Brussels machinery is practically paralyzed.
Farage would know, for as
he was to remind CNN’s Richard Quest, moments later, he, unlike his EU
antagonists, had come into politics from business. “I used to trade commodities
and currencies. I had a proper job once.”
Few in US media appreciate
that language that effectively conveys clear ideas has got to be strong. Weasel
words won’t do. Thus Ashley Banfield was flabbergasted by Farage’s verbal
whips. CNN’s verbose host was appalled, you guessed, at the “tone” taken by
Farage in his pointed remarks to the EU.
Days prior, two lunatic
American women, dressed in matching Mao-like tunics, had stormed a stage
together, where they had a petit mal fit over Donald Trump. Yet the
two—Hillary Clinton and Pocahontas, aka Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts—made reporters like Banfield giddy with Girl Power.
Never was Warren depicted
as angry or out-of-control. Instead, she was a “towering” liberal Democrat, who
delivered not ad hominem but “energy, folksy appeal and populist roar to
a candidate not known for energizing crowds.”
By contrast, Quest,
Banfield’s British-born colleague, was able to settle down to a blind panic by
the time he conducted his exhilarating interview with Mr. Farage.
No longer in a post-Brexit
frothy, Quest even accepted Farage’s forceful instruction to “stop this
nonsense about the markets. The pound has been in a bear market since July
2014. Fact!” The financial journalist was also bright enough to realize rating
agencies had proven themselves as capable of predicting the health of capital
markets as the “Against Trump” movement had foreseen the political mood of the
Republican base.
Jittery markets had begun
to self-correct, the Dow was bouncing back. Unlike their hysterical colleagues
in the US, British liberal journalists have even begun to pull back slightly in
embarrassment. Were they really going to persist in lamenting losses suffered
by global puppet-master George Soros and the financial sector, all just to take
aim at the Little People? In so doing, was not the Left showing it loved the lumpenproletariat
only as long as they got with The Left’s program?
Quest showed the same
intellectual agility as his opponent: “So, how on earth do you have the
effrontery to criticize Wall Street, the banks, you criticize a big business
when you were part of those markets?”
Image and American
politician or pundit attempting to respond to such a question with a
First-Principles answer!
Farage did. He stumped Quest by explaining, as a good political theorist
would, that markets aren’t the creatures of big business. “Good markets have
small and medium size competitors trading in them too.” He then pivoted to the
crony actions of the free-market flouting Goldman Sachs. “In cahoots with this
European commission,” such bad-faith actors did much mischief: Usher “Greece
into the Euro,” for example.
Now, to your American
audience: Imagine if NAFTA was a political union, and a court in Mexico could
overrule anything Congress did. We’re reasserting our democratic rights and in
terms of business and trade; we’ll go on trading.
Quest’s professional
counterparts in Britain (indubitably the smarter country) seem to have backed
off of accusing 17.5 million Leave voters of being old, uneducated, racist, and
generally obsolete right-wing extremists. In other words, Trump voters. The
liberal brain trust stateside has yet to grant this courtesy to Tea Party
pioneers, much less to Trump voters.
Ordinary people are slowly
coming to realize that adding a second tier of tyrants—EU, NAFTA, UN, NATO,
WTO—to their own tyrannical national governments has benefited them as a second
hangman enhances the health of a condemned man.
So when Quest resumed his
nervy narrative about the “terrible message” being sent “about what’s happening
in Britain,” their representative shot back:
Taking back ‘our country, our
laws, our courts, our borders, our pride and self-respect is a great message.
Our political class has let us down like a cheap pair of braces and what we did
last week in that referendum was say, ‘Get thee gone.’
Nigel Farage’s repartee is in a
class of its own. Observing its brilliance accentuates the absence of a similar
facility among our own mainstream clodhopper commentariat. The verbal swordplay
initiated by Farage, leader of the UKIP, often gets lost in translation,
stateside.
The dumbed-down transcript,
provided by CNN, had turned Farage’s “get thee gone” into “get the gun.”
